Gmelius CRM Review

Collaboration is especially important now that teams are working remotely more often. Despite some advantages, working remotely has several challenges like maintaining engagement, staying focused, tracking progress and more. This is where Gmelius comes in!

Founded in 2016, Gmelius is a user friendly, intuitive collaboration tool that allows teams to work together, share inboxes, labels and projects, and offer customer support. Ideal for SMBs, it is tightly integrated with Gmail, and has an extension that lets you manage everything from tasks to project management, from your inbox.

What really stands out about Gmelius is that it offers so many features without overwhelming you with a plethora of menus and drop downs.

CRM

Although it has improved quite a bit over the past couple of years, Gmelius has been criticized for lack of some of the key CRM features. While it might have all the best features in its class when it comes to collaboration, the same can’t be said about its contact management and lead nurturing capabilities.

Having said that, it does have detailed reporting and some notable automation features like sequences, which allow you to automate email campaigns as well as the team’s internal workflows.

Based on a logic that you define, Gmelius can take a “smart” decision on your behalf. For example, you can create an if/else sequence with multiple possible next steps based on the outcome of a current action. For example, if a lead doesn’t respond within X number of days, you can send a follow up email and if they do, you can add a certain label to their response.

Moreover, they have a pretty cool feature called “People Widget” in the works – which seems to have been on their roadmap for quite a while. The feature will apparently add “more contextual information and useful social data” about people who you’re having a conversation with. Unfortunately, there is no ETA on this feature so far.

Shared Inbox and Shared Labels

Shared inbox and labels is where Gmelius really shines. You can share the entire inbox or certain label with your coworkers. This increases transparency and accountability, and also ensures that things will be followed up.

In real time, you can tag coworkers, assign them emails and track ownership. The best thing is that delegation, ownership, and obligations are clearly defined, and makes working on multiple projects hassle-free.

Help Desk

With Gmelius, you can easily turn your inbox into a customer support center. You can assign incoming emails to coworkers as support tickets, and even turn them into trello-like projects on a Kanban board to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

It’s really amazing how the avatar of your coworker shows when they are reading an email and their ellipsis icon pulses when replying to an email to avoid any confusion or multiple replies. Last but not least, you can easily automate some of the repetitive tasks. For example, you can use templates to quickly respond to frequently asked questions. You can also leverage sequences, which we discussed earlier, to increase your team’s efficiency.

Gmelius, however, doesn’t allow you to have live contacts i.e. chats or phone calls. Customers might not be too excited about that, especially when there is a high severity issue. Also, while emails might be good for the times when the customer wants to ask a quick question, however, they can be a pain when it turns into a never ending back and forth, or your customer doesn’t provide enough information about their issue.

Project Management

Gmelius has Kanban boards where you can create projects and tasks, or create tasks directly from incoming emails. This makes things easy when an incoming email requires some work, for example research, reproducing customer issues, or getting help from a different team, but you also want to track the performance.

In short, you can easily organize, monitor, and track everything from Gmail with your team. Your boards get automatic updates when you change or update something in Gmail – so nothing is out of sync.

Email Campaigns

Again, Gmelius builds on top of Gmail to let you send drip email campaigns, create smart sequences, multistage campaigns, automatic follow ups and more. Creating email templates is super simple and lets you customize them for your clients by adding custom variables (such as first name, date of birth, company name etc.) and incorporating HTML templates.

Moreover, you can track which mails are doing better than others, and can easily share and sync those templates with the rest of your team. You can create new templates on the fly or one-click send templates to some or all of your contacts.

Despite all these great features, Gmail isn’t created to send bulk email, and it can be slow when sending out a lot of emails.

Analytics

Gmelius supports three kinds of analytics –email tracking, performance tracking, and trends.

Email Tracking

Gmelius is designed to track different elements of an email once it rolls from your outbox. The email tracking feature is a delight. You can find out who opened your email, read it, and clicked the link shared in the message. To enable the tracking, just toggle the “track email” feature and you are ready to go. Options in email tracking include click and link tracking, open and click rates and per recipient tracking.

Performance Tracking

Knowing what each team member is up to and their contributions to a project have never been easier. Gmelius provides detailed activity reports to analyze the performance of your team. The reports can be filtered by certain shared labels or inboxes. This information is particularly useful for managers who wish to reward good performers in their team and/or highlight areas of improvement.

Trends

Gmelius lets you analyze trends in the email content. For instance, with the People Widget (still in the works), you can get useful social information about a recipient through their email conversation and identify common trends in the content.

Automation

Gmelius with its automation features eliminates monotonous email jobs. First up is email templates which can be used by your customer support team for sending structured email replies on repetitive inquiries. You can either use Gmelius’ templates or create your personalized ones. These templates can be shared with our team members as well.

Next up in automation is email sequencing. This is highly valuable for email marketers. With these sequences, you can automate the follow-up responses for timely action. Just head to the dashboard to create your email sequences.

Often, you have to send recurring emails like reminders. This can be automated as well. Gmelius allows you to choose the frequency of the message, start and end date, and time, and automate the cumbersome task of sending reminders at different times.

Collaboration

Gmelius transforms your inbox into a central workspace making it easier for teams to collaborate on projects, tasks, and automate the workflows. The shared inbox is perfect for sending emails to a group. Shared inbox also makes it easier to assign a ticket, inquiry, or incoming lead to a team member. There is no need to forward the email separately.

Shared labels have a key role to play in collaboration too. They let you streamline messages and conversions. Assign a label to each email to make it visible and organized.

Gmelius has Trello-like Kanban boards for faster collaboration. Simply use @name of the team member to add them to a conversation.

Emails don’t have to be plain and boring, you can also create personal notes with emails. These notes could be a list of tasks, key pointers or simply asking a team member to share their feedback. You can share these notes with anyone in the team using @mention. Gmelius collaboration suite keeps everyone in sync thereby boosting transparency and productivity.

Pros

• Sleek and easy to use dashboard
• Simplifies your Gmail inbox for everyday use
• Commendable email and performance tracking features
• Customize your inbox the way you want
• All great features packed in an affordable price

Cons

• Lacks some of the must-have CRM features like comprehensive contact management, lead tracking and scoring, customizable pipeline etc.
• Integrates with just a few third-party apps
• Sending emails to multiple recipients takes time
• Mobile app is still in beta

Conclusion

Gmelius is reasonably priced, easy to use, and packed with a good variety of features. From sharing inbox and managing email support tickets to managing projects and automating workflows, it offers a bunch of handy features, right inside your inbox. On top of that, it also ensures that customer emails won’t fall through the cracks – no matter you want to turn them into a project and create a card on the Kanban board or simply assign it as a support ticket to a team member.

In short, there are many better options available if your team doesn’t use Gmail or you want a CRM software. However, if you’re looking for a project management and collaboration tool, whether your team works remote or you just want to streamline the workflows, Gmelius is undoubtedly one of the top options out there.